The Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed, aid-dependent entity that rules the West Bank, pays salaries to terrorists and their families. Congress is currently considering legislation to prevent American tax dollars from being used in this way to incentivize Palestinian terrorism against Israel.
Major media outlets, however, are glossing over both the legislation and the problem it was created to solve.
The proposed law is named after a murdered U.S. veteran. On March 9, 2016, a former U.S. Army officer named Taylor Force was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel. Force, 28, had survived deployments in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to be murdered while part of a tour group for Vanderbilt University, where he was an MBA student studying global entrepreneurship. Ten other people were stabbed before Israeli police killed the attacker.
As a reward for his deed, that family of Force’s killer is receiving lifetime payments doled out by the Palestinian Authority. And this isn’t going on covertly — it’s a matter of Palestinian law. The PA passed laws in 2004 and 2013 stipulating that convicted terrorists and their families will receive these monthly payments. The 2004 law specifies that the money be for the “fighting sector,” which it referred to as an “integral part of the fabric of Palestinian society.”
The Palestinian Authority pays significant sums for what it has chosen to prioritize legislatively and culturally. According to a Jan. 9, 2018 report by Israel’s defense ministry, the PA paid terrorists and their families nearly $350 million dollars in 2017 — $160 million for jailed and released prisoners, and $190 million for their families.
As others have pointed out, the payments and benefits vary by terrorist. They increase with the length of sentence and the number of people murdered or injured in the act of terror.
Despite breaking its promises to refrain from inciting anti-Jewish violence, the PA continues to be a significant beneficiary from U.S. foreign aid. According to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, that assistance has “totaled around $600 million annually in recent years.”
In order to prevent U.S. taxpayer funds from indirectly funding terrorism (after all, the money is fungible), the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Taylor Force Act on Dec. 5, 2017. A press release by the House Foreign Affairs Committee noted that the legislation “restricts U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority unless it stops subsidizing terrorists through pay-to-slay policies.”
As of this writing, however, a few anonymous senators are — without explanation — holding up the legislation’s passage in the upper chamber.
Both the proposed law and the PA’s “pay-to-slay” program should be widely known, but both have gone underreported. News outlets that have extensively tracked the story, such as the Washington Examiner, are the exception. Others, meanwhile, have got their facts wrong.
The Washington Post, for example, ran a misleading March 14, 2018 “Fact Checker” column that minimized and obfuscated on the PA’s policy of paying for terrorism. Relying on questionable sources, the Post cited “documentation provided by” the Palestine Liberation Organization, formerly a U.S.-designated terror group and one that is led by the same man who leads the PA: Mahmoud Abbas. Worse still, the Post cited research about Palestinian prisoners that was provided by Defense for Children International-Palestine, a group tied to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The secretary of DCI-P’s board, Fatima Daana, is the widow of the commander of PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades. One DCI-P employee, Hashem Abu Maria, was celebrated by the PFLP as a “commander” of the terrorist group after his 2014 death.
Trusting terrorist-linked entities for a “fact check” on terrorist payments is pretty poor journalism. The Post even trotted out the tired cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter” and claimed that a “big problem is definitional”; the PA doesn’t list payments to terrorists and their families, but instead uses words such as “Palestinian prisoners” and “martyrs.”
The PA, however, is clear on the meaning. The authority has defended the practice and refused U.S. demands to quit paying terrorists. Indeed, the same day that the Post’s column appeared, PA President Abbas met with Rajaei Haddad, a recently released terrorist imprisoned for his 1998 conviction of complicity in the murder of an Israeli. According to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Abbas congratulated Haddad and said, “The prisoners issue holds a special place in the priorities of the Palestinian leadership.”
The laws that provide for payments to the so-called “fighting sector” that murdered Taylor Force are emblematic of a society that chooses to name streets, sports tournaments and schools after terrorists. PA-approved textbooks even use “martyrs” to explain math, according to a 2017 study by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education. Grotesquely, candy and other sweets are often passed around in Palestinian towns after a successful terrorist attack — including Force’s murder — as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has documented.
The Palestinian Authority pays terrorists and their families. Aid money is fungible, and American taxpayers, in part, make those paychecks possible. Absent an unerring media spotlight, the PA’s ‘pay to slay’ program looks likely to continue. And unless the Senate acts, Americans will keep paying for it.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
